EGYPTIAN INSCRIPTIONS IN AMERICA

With the passage of time, persistent researchers normally manage to unearth new information to enrich previous works. This is the case with Paul Gallez on the subject of ancient Egyptians in America, published in Predescubrimientos de América (Instituto Patagónico, Bahía Blanca 2001, p 52 onwards).

Gallez says: ‘In 1976, Barry Fell (América A.C. Los primeros colonizadores del Nuevo Mundo. México, Diana 1983) gave his translation of a tri-lingual inscription found on a funeral mound in Davenport, Iowa, that describes the Egyptian new year celebration held on the March equinox.

The three languages are Egyptian, Iberian Punic and Libyan. This stone has been dated at 800 BC, during the twenty-first Egyptian dynasty (Libyan). The phrases referring to astronomy and religion in traditional ancient Egyptian characters only vary in passages copied by different hands'.

According to French television, he adds, an Egyptian mummy dating from the same twenty-first dynasty was perfumed with tobacco and cocaine, two typically American products.

 Another sensational discovery, also made by Barry Fell, is the use of pictorial writing by the Micmac Indians of Arcadia, the Canadian region lying north of Maine and south of the Saint Lawrence estuary. This tribe, which belongs to the Algonquin nation (*), was converted to Christianity in the eighteenth century by Abbe Maillard, who used pictorial writing to compose a catechism, a religious history, the rites of mass, the main prayers and some of the psalms for his parishioners.

In 1738, Maillard drew up his Manuel hieroglyphicus Micmac for the use of his French compatriots. For more than two hundred years Maillard was believed to have made up these pictorial characters to write these prayers for the faithful of his parish, but in 1823, sixty-one years after Maillard's death, Campolion began the task of decoding them.

Barry Fell has now shown that these Egyptian hieroglyphics are very similar to those used by the Micmac. How was Maillard able to learn Egyptian writing before Campolion showed how it could be read and its meaning understood. There is only one possible answer �?declares Gallez: the Micmac knew and indeed used Egyptian pictorial writing and had learned it from the Egyptians themselves.

How and when this might have occurred are unsolved mysteries, but the fact that the relevant questions are now being asked is a great step forward. The fact is that the present-day Algonquin hold an annual celebration to mark their ancestors' arrival in America from across the sea, but they know neither where they came from nor when.

In another chapter, Fell shows an inscription found in Texas, etched in the Libyan language using the Ogam alphabet, which tells of the arrival of the crew of a ship belonging to king Shishong, the name of several kings of Egypt reigning between 1000 and 800 BC.

As for South America, Barry Fell was able to convince only a handful of Chileans that the rock inscription in Tinguiririca (34º 45´S) represents Egyptian territorial claims. The inscriptions were found by Karl Stolp in a cave in the Andes in 1885 and the results of his research were published in 1877 in the journal of the Sociedad Científica de Chile.

Some years later, in October 1974, Barry Fell came across Karl Stolp's article with the reproduction of the main inscription in the Tinguririca grotto and discovered that it must refer to the same expedition that also reached New Guinea. Fell translated the lithograph as follows:

‘Southern boundary of the coast reached by Mawi. This region forms the southern boundary of the mountainous land the captain claims by written proclamation in this triumphant land.